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DeCSS
Definitions DeCSS is DeCSS is "a free, effective and fast means of decrypting . . . DVDs and copying them to computer hard drives.Id. at 315. Origins and history DeCSS was devised by three people, two of whom remain anonymous. It was released on the Internet mailing list LiViD in October 1999. The one known author of the trio is Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, whose home was raided in 2000 by Norwegian police. Still a teenager at the time, he was put on trial in a Norwegian court for violating Norwegian Criminal Code section 145,Norwegian Criminal Code section 135-147.http://www.lovdata.no/all/tl-19020522-010-017.html and faced a possible jail sentence of two years and large fines, but was acquitted of all charges in early 2003. However, on March 5, 2003, a Norwegian appeals court ruled that Johansen would have to be retried. The court said that arguments filed by the prosecutor and additional evidence merited another trial. On December 22, 2003, the appeals court agreed with the acquittal, and on January 5, 2004, Norway's Økokrim (Economic Crime Unit) decided not to pursue the case further. The program was first released on October 6, 1999 when Johansen posted an announcement of DeCSS 1.1b, a closed source Windows-only application for DVD ripping, on the livid-dev mailing list. The source code was leaked before the end of the month. The first release of DeCSS was preceded by a few weeks by a program called DoD DVD Speed Ripper''See'' "The Truth about DVD CSS cracking" (Nov. 4, 1999).http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/dvdtruth.txt from a group called Drink or Die, which didn't include source code and which apparently did not work with all DVDs. Drink or Die reportedly disassembled the object code of the Xing DVD player to obtain a player key. The group that wrote DeCSS, including Johansen, came to call themselves Masters of Reverse Engineering and may have obtained information from Drink or Die. On January 22, 2004, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) dropped the case against Jon Johansen."EFF: DVD Descrambling Code Not a Trade Secret" (Dec. 5, 2005).http://web.archive.org/20040124035422/www.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/20040122_eff_pr.php Jon Lech Johansen's involvement The DeCSS program was a collaborative project, in which Jon wrote the graphical user interface. The transcripts from the Borgarting Court of Appeal, published in the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, contain the following description of the process which led to the release of DeCSS:See Transcript. Hele DVD-dommen Legal response The chief complaint against DeCSS (and similar programs) is that once the unencrypted source video is available in digital form, it can be copied without degradation, so DeCSS can be used for copyright infringement. The first legal threats against sites hosting DeCSS, and the beginning of the DeCSS mirroring campaign, began in about early November 1999.See Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000). As a response to these threats a program also called DeCSS but with an unrelated function was developed. This program can be used for stripping Cascading Style Sheets tags from an HTML page. As of 2007, DeCSS and several clones (which have not been specifically brought to court) can be readily obtained over the Internet. References External resources * DeCSS Central (Information about DVD, CSS, DeCSS, LiVid, the DVD CCA and MPAA and the various lawsuits surrounding DeCSS). * [http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/19 DVD Industry Takes 2600 to Court, 2600 News (Dec. 27, 1999).] * The Openlaw DVD/DeCSS Forum Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) List. * Seth Schoen, DeCSS Haiku - How to Decrypt a DVD - in Haiku form. * Seth Schoen, The History of the DeCSS Haiku. * DeCSS Explained - A Technical Overview of the CSS Decryption Algorithm. * MoRE and dEZZY/DoD, The Truth About DVD CSS Cracking. Category:Software Category:Technology Category:Copyright Category:DMCA Category:Circumvention Category:Acronyms Category:Definition Category:1999